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  • City/Stage/Globe: Performance and Space in Shakespeare’s London
  • Marissa Greenberg
City/Stage/Globe: Performance and Space in Shakespeare’s London. By D. J. Hopkins. New York and London: Routledge Press, 2008. Pp. xii + 235 (cloth). $95.00 (paper).

City/Stage/Globe: Performance and Space in Shakespeare’s London joins other recent studies in examining London as the site, occasion, and subject of literary production. Through analyses of a range of cultural events and texts, Hopkins argues that the “performance culture” (7, emphasis in original) of medieval London persisted even as early modern representational strategies began to obtain. While this argument unfolds in interesting and productive ways, the book’s greatest contribution lies in its methodology. Part of Routledge’s series on “Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory,” City/Stage/Globe brings a profound investment in performance theories and practices to the study of literary London. Hopkins frames his project as a history of performance in space, or “a performance genealogy of space” (6). This phrase, which reworks Joseph Roach’s “genealogies of performance” in Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (1996), signals Hopkins’s disinclination for teleology. While City/Stage/Globe thus grapples with discontinuity, associative logic, and upheaval, as its eponymous slashes suggest, its crux lies in the residual traces and gradual transitions of performance over space and time. The boon of this approach is a sustained attention to continuities and overlaps in and among history, media, and critical theories.

In his introduction, Hopkins outlines performance and space as the methodological bases and the objects of his study. He signals his debt to the work of performance theorists, especially Robert Weimann, and spatial theorists, including Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault, and Edward Soja. Hopkins explains the relevance of these theories to his analysis of civic pageantry, mappings, and plays: “the tools of performance theory [ . . . ] locate the ways in which these (largely) ephemeral events contributed to lasting change in the spatial concepts and physical terrain of early modern London” (3). In this parenthetical “largely,” Hopkins indicates a proclivity for performance, defined in terms of embodied activity, over representation, presented as reified, passive, and literally or figuratively textual. On the opening page of City/Stage/Globe, in fact, he declares: “I study performance to intercept my discontent [a phrase borrowed from Weimann’s Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice (2000)] with representation, and [ . . . ] [End Page 137] I study space to intercept my discontent with text” (1). That “largely” appears in parentheses also gestures to a larger issue at stake in his project: “Though individual performances may be temporal, performance as a culture-wide strategy for the organization of space proves to be surprisingly durable” (8). Performance’s durability manifests, he avers, in the cityspace of “postmedieval” London (a claim to which I return below). Here “postmedieval,” a term adapted from urban historians, indicates less physical topography than social practices of space that, though roughly contemporaneous with Shakespeare’s lifetime, extend from the fifteenth to late-seventeenth centuries. While the aforementioned “physical terrain” thus receives somewhat short shrift, the emphasis on the conceptions and uses of cityspace facilitates City/Stage/Globe’s more significant agenda: an account of performance and representation as competing strategies in the creation and transmission of spatial meaning.

Chapter 1, “Writing and Performing in ‘Postmedieval’ London,” gives an overview of the “[h]ybridity of performance and textual cultures” in England’s capital city between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries (34). The chapter opens with a consideration of Elizabeth’s entry into London before her coronation. Hopkins contends that the young queen’s active participation in this event evinces the persistence of a medieval performance culture in sixteenth-century London. At the same time, Elizabeth’s was the first entry to be put into print in Richard Mulcaster’s The Quene’s Majestie’s Passage. “The textualization of a royal performance was unprecedented,” Hopkins asserts, “making [Mulcaster’s] document and the event it (more or less) records landmarks in the emerging concept of the postmedieval” (33). Once again, Hopkins uses parentheses to gesture to both the ephemerality and the durability of performance. Touching briefly on a number of medieval and early modern...

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